DAX, The Dark Knight

Excel Formulas Are easy, So Why Is DAX So Hard?

Recently, Rob Collie, aka PowerPivotPro, posted a blog entry entitled ‘The Ballad of Ken Puls, DAX Convert’. Whilst it was an interestiung post, this is not to specifically offer any comment on that blog, or to stroke Ken’s ego <g>, I was intrigued by the part where Rob mentioned that Ken had said, and I quote,

“I firmly believe that PowerPivot is the future of Excel. No question in my mind. It’s insanely easy to get some killer BI in your hands with very little learning, which is awesome. But… What I don’t get is DAX. The light just isn’t going on for me. If you want to mobilize the Excel Pro army to really make this take off, DAX needs to become accessible for us.”

This rang a bell with me, as about six weeks ago I taught a 2 day PowerPivot course with Chris Webb to a class of 15 technology savvy people. These are smart people, but it was clear when covering the more advanced aspects of DAX that they were straining to grasp some of the concepts. On my journey home I was pondering about this. I have stated before that I believe that Microsoft over-egg the simplicity of PowerPivot, suggesting that any user can pick up PowerPivot and create fantastic BI immediately. I think that, whilst easy to get started, to really get the true potential out of PowerPivot you have to have some understanding of Data Modelling.

Have Microsoft got it wrong with DAX as well when they took a deliberate decision to make DAX Excel-like in its syntax? In many ways, this is understandable, their experience of MDX, which really is hard, could weigh heavily on their outlook. But, it has been a double-edged sword in my view. Excel users people are quite ready to give DAX a go because it looks as easy as Excel formulas, but conversely, when they get to advanced DAX (CALCULATE, FILTER, ALL, etc.), they can easily get dis-heartened because it is not as easy as Excel formulas.

So I thought I would look at why DAX is so hard for an Excel user. I came up with 7 topics that I decided to look at, namely:

Data Typed

Integer Dates

Formula Formatting

Evaluation Context

Extendible

Debugging Aids

Ease of use

Data Typed

Integer Dates

Formula Formatting

Extendible

Debugging Aids

DAX is great if your formula works, but when it doesn’t you need good tools to help you debug it. Unfortunately. Microsoft haven’t provided any debugging tools whatsoever, so debugging is hard, incredibly hard. It should be part of our course, but with no tools to talk about there is nothing to suggest yet.

Just to complicate matters, the data usually consists of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands or millions, of rows, and reducing it to a reduced set is not staright-forward.

Marco Russo, Darren Gosbell, Angry Koala, and Paul te Braak have created a nice Excel addin called DAX Studio which is as good as it gets. it is a useful tool for building DAX formulae, as described by Javier Guillen in his post Using DAX studio to create PowerPivot measures, and this technique can be used to rebuild the formula from scratch checking as you go, but it is not reall a debugging tool, and was not meant as such.

Compare this to Excel. In Excel, the helpful debugging facilities are:

Evaluate Formula

Watch Window

F9

The Evaluate Formula facility lets you evaluate a formula in the activecell, stepping through it as each stage of the formula seeing what the result at that stage is, until it is fully resolved. It allows allows stepping in and out of the cell value if the expression being evaluated is a single cell.

The Watch Window allows you to add a cell or a range of cells to be watched, thw window showing the current value, reflecting any changes.

F9 allows you to select any expression within the formula bar and see what it resolves to. The expression can be a single cell, a function, or a set of functions, as long as it is an expression that can be resolved in its own right.

So, three facilties to assist in debugging the formula should make Excel formula debugging easy? In reality, I never use Evaluate Formula or the Watch Window as they do not provide enough value in my view. F9 is very useful, in that it is possible to evaluate any part of the formula. This is in contrast to Evaluate Formula, which evaluates the whole formula which means that the TRUE path is only evaluated, whereas with F9 you can select any part and have it evaluated regardless of whether the actual data would force the formula to follow that path or not.

Okay, Excel has a few tools, which is a few more than DAX, but they are hardly what you would call sophisticated. It still mainly relies on experience, intuition, and insight to be able to debug the more complex Excel formulae. Debugging DAX is diffocult, but debugging complex Excel formulae is not the easiest task either.

Evaluation Context

Evaluation context is probably the

Evaluation context is the aspect of DAX that people struggle with most when they start with PowerPivot. Understanding filter context and row context, when each comes into play, how you can override aspects of the filter context, all of this can seem mind boggling at first.